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Total Conversion HL2 Mod
bbzzdd writes "A comprehensive total conversion of the Half-Life 2 game has been released. Crafted by students from SMU's Guildhall, Eclipse is a beautiful change of pace from the average FPS. From the site: 'You play as a young Sorceress named Violet whose father went missing five years back. After learning the secrets of Telekinesis, you are teleported into Auld-Haven, a lush and fertile land where Violet grew up. Your objective is to return to Violet's home where she last saw her father years ago and dig up any clues to his whereabouts. In the broken down tower of her home you discover a journal left by her father. The journal unlocks a handful of secrets that ultimately leads you on a quest to find the ancient teleportation device - the Standing Stones.'"
Someone please post bittorent for it? The download section is being slashdotted!
No, the first was Plan of Attack, released over two months ago.
A total conversion doesn't have change genres, like HL1, CS, TFC, and Natural Selection were also total conversions, and all are FPSs.
The space unintentionally left unblank.
We have something called a 'market economy.' When it costs more to do something than you get back for doing it, say, paying all those programmers to port a game to another operation system as opposed to the number of units you will sell on those platforms, we don't do it.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
Die capitalist pig!!!
In order to find the Standing Stones, you have to develop a series of Java applications.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
The screenshots look pretty good--and they're not even /.ed yet!
Managed to get onto the site, 5 minutes later, no longer possible :-
:-
t ar t=1
:-
obligatory google cache link
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cach...+&hl=en&s
Download links
http://eclipse.gmwalek.com/viewtopic.php?t=21
http://halflife2.filefront.com/file/;43287
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Yeah, just to let you know you are going to Stonehenge.
Thanks. Now that brings back horrible memories of an Electronic Arts game from the early/mid 80s called "The Standing Stones". A truly terrible, stinky game. Now I'll have to wait another 20 years to have my mind purged of that brutal thing.
Trolling is a art,
http://www.filerush.com/torrents/Eclipse-Setup.exe .torrent
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:nbEeDXhjeqYJ: students.guildhall.smu.edu/eclipse/+&hl=en&start=1
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Site is pretty much fscked now. No one will be able to download the game for the next few days until someone can come up with some mirrors.
You're nothing; like me.
I wouldn't argue this mod is a total conversion, but Plan of Attack certainly wasn't, just the first real mod for hl2, still a teamplay FPS. Total conversion refers to HL rally, or before then Snark Racer, or Half-Life Chess, or ZZTetris.
h ots/gallery_ah05.html (better dressed than Alyx for sure)
From the screenshots it looked as if this mod is third-person, which is different from hl2 in which Gordon doesn't even have a player model. Kinda a good thing I guess, cos I wouldn't to see Gordon dressed anything like that. Check out http://students.guildhall.smu.edu/eclipse/screens
Edit: Ok I think total conversion means shares none of the same story, textures, models etc. No. I don't have a clue. Correct me please.
Boo hoo, pipe down.
-e-
Half-Life 1 was a total conversion? So we're calling new commercial games "conversions" now?
Also, none of the mods you listed were TC's because they used great amounts of Half-Life content, especially sounds and texturemaps.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This reminds me alot of American McGee's Alice, that came out a few years back. Of which Rogue Entertainment's site doesn't even appear to exist anymore and EA's site doesn't even give mention too. It looks like the only weapon is the ability to slam objects into each other though.
I'm a big fan of the new paths opening in game development. Sure to some extent you could always modify games as an end user, but when they started to get beyond simple text based MUDs the programming knowledge required began to increase exponentially. Now that the games are starting to standardize on some standard engines at the core, modifying the game becomes simpler through the use of defined APIs and SDKs. This gives us the hacks (aimbots and ilk) that tend to crop up in Multiplayer games, but it also gives us stuff like this program (Eclipse) which was created in 5 months(!), and it gives us the burgeoning Machima world where people are building animated stories using these game engines.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
Biggest Linux news site on the web? You're reading it.
Biggest Open Source news site on the web? You're reading it.
it's a legitimate concern. Off topic, it is not.
This sounds exactly like Fables story. Hopefully someone can do it well...
where's the "remove clothes and run nude" button??
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As Violet, you must save your father from a collapsing web server before it's too late.
Whoops.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Estrogen not included.
...access the page in the story. Clearly we did a total conversion to the server (to burnt carbon, of course).
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
They're not selling it, so the point is moot.
You're nothing; like me.
I think Cuba is the country you'd go to if you want communism in your daily life.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Steam's weekly update talked about this and another Source Engine mod done by the students at Guildhall, Samurai Legends (same url, but /samurailegends/, link also dead), a couple of days ago. The samurai game was multiplayer and from the screenshots looked very pretty. I couldn't find the link to the Valve page, but I found the relevant text on a bulletin board:
"Next Saturday, Valve's CEO and founder, Gabe Newell, will be giving the commencement speech at Southern Methodist University's Guildhall, a university program offering course work in game design. Two groups of students enrolled in the program will be releasing the Source MODs they produced during their term."
Coral Cache
http://students.guildhall.smu.edu.nyud.net:8090/ec lipse/index.html
Well, get coding, than!
http://www.fileshack.com/file.x?fid=7218
Then don't download it. We will decide for ourselves if it's boring or not.
Jackass.
http://www.iddl.vt.edu/~jackie/eclipsesetup.exe.to rrent/
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
...How does her top stay up?
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Interesting. That must be why more games get ported to Linux than the Mac, because Linux has a bigger desktop share... Oh, wait...
This is a pititful excuse by game developers who don't want to change their attitudes or outlooks. All that make your game easily portable requires is dumping all the DirectBlah BS and using an API that doesn't make you Microsoft's whipping boy.
Heck, if the API is inadequate, you could even add a bit to it for whatever it is you needed and release the changes back. It might make it easier to make games, which would make a bigger market, which would probably make things better for everybody.
As it is, I tend to buy games from small independents (Garage Games, Guild Software, Introversion Software, the list goes on) instead of the big publishers because the game developers who work for them have minds of their own and tend to make Linux versions of stuff. As opposed to people like you who stick their fingers in their ears and chant 'Marketshare' over and over again.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Games "standardized" on a few main engines (Unreal and Quake 2) 6-7 years ago. And SDK's have been released by the developers of the new games for the same time. These trends have existed for over half a decade, and now you're mentioning them as if they've just started.
Please don't mistake hatred of communism for realisation of the fact that it's a good form of government for things other than homo sapiens.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
This is what it boils down to: There are next to zero sane individuals who will do something without something in return. However, that something can be broadly defined. But for most people, it's something tangible.
Like money.
On a note: The Last Game I Bought was NWN or WarCraft 3, whichever came out last. I've started making my own games now. Working on a MUD.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
http://students.guildhall.smu.edu.nyud.net:8090/ec lipse/index.html
I love it when people shout out "COMMUNISM DOESN'T WORK!!!" and point at the former Soviet Union, because then I can shout out "CAPITALISM DOESN'T WORK!!!" and point at every single failing capitalist economy and poor-as-fuck country. Let's take a look at one of the countries that has benefited the MOST from capitalism: Haiti. Yeah, capitalism sure works for Haitians.
What people like you don't seem to realize is that capitalism works GREAT if your country is already rich , but when you're broke as fuck it's the equivalent of being a broke as fuck private citizen in a capitalist economy. Sure, you can become super wealthy, but is it more likely that someone already rich will become richer or someone poor will become richer?
Gimme a break, you narrow minded tool. Quit your whining about your one-right-way-to-live.
Jesus was a market economist and he explicitly told us to be more like him. Sell Sell Sell! ANYTHING ELSE IS INSANE. Open the church for a bigger bazar, you think I preach for free?! My life ain't going to pay for itself...
I get to be a young sorceress named Violet? If I am going to do the transgendered thing, I want to be a real hottie.
I'm not sure if you got the sarcasm... Linux has a desktop marketshare that's roughly equivalent (and quite possibly greater) to the Mac's.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Very cool concept, and incredibly lush outdoor environments (my 6600GT choked on it at a couple of spots). However, it's only got about an hour of gameplay. Hopefully more will come out of it, the little bit that's there is fun to play.
This is probably nostalgia speaking, but I miss games like menzoberanzan -- it had more of a complete story than most of these FPS games have now adays.
I'll admit, though, that the HLs have had good stories. And the new FFs probably have good stories, though the last one I've played is FFIII on SNES.
i guess the same has happened in most industries though -- the need to keep up with technology/compete has reduced the depth and quality of the stories.
and to make this social -- the same has happened in our society. we feel our priority is to be able to compete, so our schools have responded by becoming increasingly vocational.
it's sad though when survival requires you live a shallower life. it's really making me question whether or not humanity's really progressing...
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
I doubt that will ever happen.
Just look at the new compile tools source for hl2... they are soo tightly integrated with steam that it will never be something easily ported over. Hell, you can't run them on linux unless you do it through wine.
Thank you! It's nice to actually see an informed opinion on this mod as opposed to the bullsh*t AC statements about it being "lame" and "gay" from the tards who didn't bother to download it and have nothing better to do apparently.
I'm looking forward to trying it out myself and at least getting feedback to the team who made it. If they get enough positive responses and suggestions, hopefully they'll do more. Those who do really good and creative mods won't know that their work is appreciated unless we tell them so and as such will probably not make any more under a false impression that no one like what they've done. That would be a shame not only from their standpoint but also from ours since we would no longer get any quality mods from the group.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
You can run it on Linux with Cedega. There's a bit of a nasty performance hit though.
you could opensource the game under a licence other than the gnu licence so that it still may be sold. how many people are doing to download and compile the source? how many people COULD compile the source (ie know what there doing)? how many people run linux (or bsd or whatever, non windows) where it is much easier to do so? and finally how many people would (even with all these in their favor) prefet to buy the game, to get a valid serial number, so it may get the updates from online aswell as connect to the servers for online play, not to mention the bonus of the magaziene, the company support, and all the other things that can come with a boxed sat (can you say free t-shirt?) it would seem to me that even if the game was opensource, the company wouldnt lose much is any profit off of it, because the linux market is low, not many people know how to compile it, and ontop of that alot of people pride them selves in accualy owning the game (not to mention for online games u need 2 buy a copy to play online)... and then when the linux platform becomes more popular then developers could port their own games if they wish, not needing to make them opensource if they wished (however they would now need to develope for 2 platforms instead of using the linux coder zealots to do it for them for free.... anyway thats just my 0.02 cents. take it for what its worth!
Noone writes jokes in base 13!
World history says hi. Anything less than a hundred years is not a very long time. There are a bunch of capitalist countries that are rich by worlwide standards. The only Communist country that comes close is China, and only if you ignore about 90% of the population. And the only reason they come close is because they have enough people to manufacture products for capitalist nations.
Gimme a break, you small-minded tool. Some of us don't want to be as poor as everyone else.
Communism does not work for human beings because not enough human beings want to see other people profiting from their hard work. Another reason it doesn't work is not everybody wants to be equal to everyone else.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
I probably did miss the sarcasm. I'm only compliant with CSS3.0 standard sarcasm tags.
I'm sorry.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
I've seen some really good total conversion mods for various games. Sometimes these things are down right commercial quality. Normally these mods are given away for free in hopes of gaining recognition, but is it legal to sell them? I could see $15 unofficial HL2 add-on boxes sitting on a Walmart shelf.
You've been hanging out on Slashdot reality distortion field too long. Mac's desktop share is about 100x Linux's share.
"Haitians?! Fuck 'em!"
PS: Uhh, World History? I dunno if anyone told you this, but overall you are pretty fucken' poor. I wouldn't call attention to yourself on shit like this cuz you come off a prick.
Jesus was a socialist, and he threw the moneylenders out of the temple.
However, it immmediately shuts up the second you show it to any network executives.
Everybody loves the Michigan Ra-aaag
Last post!
Thank you! Writing cross-platform is not difficult, even for applications as big and complex as 3D games, if you do a bit of planning beforehand. Use SDL. Use a video codec that isn't restricted to Windows. That gets you about 95% of the way there.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
No, no it didn't.
Quake was open-sourced three years after it came out and a full two years after Quake II's engine made the Q1 engine financially obsolete for licensing purposes. Releasing the Q1 code did little "work" for id except earn them a tremendous amount of goodwill from the open-source community. Their only financial benefit came from the licensing fees that came in when the dozens of commercial games developed by the OS community and based on Q1's code were released.
Don't confuse your rabid hatred of closed-source software with a sense of how to run a profitable business.
http://www.morrowind.com/
Wow, I disagree -- in fact I'd argue that it's actually a minority of people whose only motivation in life is money. What's more, it's a learned social sickness most prevalent in capitalist countries (the marketers have done wonders in brain washing you, son. They tell you that your self-worth is based on the pile of money you have how expensive your jeans are. Most Americans believe them). What you're describing is a capitalist-consumer state of mind, not a universal truth about the human condition.
Without calling each other names -- let's just say that you and I have pretty divergent opinions of humanity.
* An aside: I think there should be an addendum to the "Hitler in an argument" clause, where if anyone points to the downfall of the USSR as proof of the basic merits of a political system they automatically lose the argument. If you think communism is a bad idea (and I'm not saying that it is or isn't), how about a *real* reason, not historical happenstance.
Wow.
I've forgotten how good some coders can be after seeing so much crap.
This is of high enough quality that it could be a commercial game. Thanks [insert god here] that it's free.
No existe.
She is hot.. :D
On a second note, I don't think the solution to a non Microsoft game API is to take an API, "add a bit" and release it back... do that few times, with a few developers, and you're likely to end up with a mess.
I also don't know if OpenGL is a valid cross platform API... or maybe it won't be in the future. Microsoft did buy up some of the patents, and while it looks like you're still free of Microsoft control, it sure would make me nervous as a game developer. They could easily bury me in lawsuits, even if they were obviously on made up grounds.
Pity that even an academia produced game persists in keeping gamer female stereotypes alive. Violet's obviously a good friend of Lara's.
To the ladies out there: when you go adventuring, are high heeled boots, knee high skirts and boob tubes what you like to wear?
When will games stop trying to appeal to the hormones of 15 year old boys? Honestly, noone's got one hand on the mouse and the other hand on their schlong while playing games.. do they?!Looks awesome! Plus she's got big boobies...
Haven't tried it yet, but in the process of downloading it (alas, I'm not blessed with a T3).
Shamelessly ripped from NW Vault:
And the game description: The module can be found here:
http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Modules.Deta
Requires SoU, HotU and CEP.
ed2k:7Cfile7CEclipse-Setupexe7C2395291307C32C69BE7 D2E78ADED6CA7228C0BCCCAE7Cp088BA9D89EF9987D2A626E3 DBD1E10CA99FB442203EF2346E3101F5B32BA10BA7501B4F67 6F6EE654F01AAB91201F24C63EF35F285A65C66CBF745C60D7 C9E6D7D685E22D0EAF5E0ED625B03F943A3156651A121CD770 9C17B4E7E9A6D65A19D8E9F9FF74F6B404A9CBCD5DA99690BC 063600F10C646D3754DC94DD87B8F8ECD3610F3C6D23319778 77F8CDD5F96CFABD09B3331F79548D52334FB1521D9B8D0485 A3AC7FD273F489BAFD753EE6A392D31DEBF59DBA1DB706EF78 10147502ADA4ED352FEA27CF0B011902FA785A477FD7DD7D8D EA04A1DC7D42F4FF28C3041FC857E51238C938B4BF1C0B76CC AD822AAC50E6CC6ADC776B6222B5F306F6290AC9183D476248 5262DC605AAB7F2CA62E35E3FA316462CD0E1A6540F2F8AACF 37056E62B3C08F25A3FC0403F0B3E0B8EE55163160F55CA4DE E81AD588C1D7462EF32485B80B6AF83AF2C0211CA5665AA20B CE6E171ADAF195C20D2FADBF9B70FFDA55770B420CA5218DC8 F9F79A79FD652F05DB7E2EE5F46345681A7CFCD697ADA22AC5 340E539163C3083D881F18723A97ChNH2TJRJEX25U2UR625RL W4WURR6H53JQ7CshttpguildhallsmueduworkMediaEclipse -Setupexe7C
That explains why they were able to develop it in just five months. :-)
Thank you. I'll probably play it anyway, hardware willing. It looks neat--also short games take less of a time investment than long ones do. If my hardware's good enough, I'll play it, write up my opinion of it on the Eclipse site, thank the students for making the game if it doesn't suck, and move on. Happy day.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Get back to yar chares Solomon, or ye will feel the wrath of this here belt. -Concerned Amish Parent
It doesn't work because not everyone is equal to anyone else. Note, it wouldn't work if everyone was equal either. The only way to make everyone equal is not to raise everyone up to a higher level, but to lower everyone to the lowest level. Societies do not advance by lowering people, but rather by people being allowed to raise themselves.
We have something called a 'market economy.'
IN the US at least we have a mixed economy, because in a pure free market there's a mechanism whereby one actor can establish a positive feedback loop and expand to the limits of their market segment and choke off the competition that's essential to the proper workings of the market. Unfortunately the regulatory mechanism intended to prevent it doesn't work well when the regulators don't understand the market in question.
THe point is, the reason it doesn't pay to do the port is that the market isn't working right, and many of the mechanisms intended to promote competition and advances in the arts and sciences are actually preventing their development.
I don't think there's a way to fix it, but at least in the meantime I would recommend taking a less simplistic view of the "market".
For example, one of the reasons that it's expensive to port a game is that the market leader has managed to make it uneconomical for game developers to use the most sidely used and portable graphics API on their operating system, in favor of one that they control and can use to discourage ports to other platforms. If it wasn't for this barrier to entry it would actually be practical to write a game using components that ran on all current platforms, and so a port to another platform would be a matter of weeks or even days for a small team, rather than a near-reimplementation that can take months.
Some of us are late bloomers... :(
I am sure I am not the first one to read that as adult-heaven, am I not?
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
It's on the desktop, near the My Computer, My Network Places and My Documents icons.
That's because it's the weekend and no one is at work. Who has time to browse slashdot on their own time?
And it took a very long time for Communism to collapse in Russia.
Hopefully it won't take that long for the "Planned Economy" in operating systems run out of Redmond to collapse. If you look at the state of Windows, with its collapsing "health care" system and the use of placebos instead of secure design, the analogy between Redmond and Moscow is very close.
Game developers are not operating in a free market. They can not pick and choose the best tools to write games with, because it's not economically viable to use any tools that haven't been blessed by Microsoft.
As for Haiti, its problem isn't a function of whether its economy is capitalist, socialist, mixed, kleptocratic, or anarchist. Its problem is that the United States has been fighting a covert low-grade campaign against it for as long as it's existed.
Testify. I think it was summed up best at the end of 'Enemy at the Gates.'
DANILOV:I've been such a fool, Vassili. Man will always be man. There is no new man. We worked so hard to create a society that was equal, where there'd be nothing to envy your neighbour. But there's always something to envy. A smile, a friendship, something you don't have and want to appropriate. In this world, even a Soviet one, there will always be rich and poor. Rich in gifts, poor in gifts. Rich in love, poor in love.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
http://mirrors-av.club-internet.fr/pub/games/nofra g/halflife2/mods/Eclipse-Setup.exe s e-Setup.exe i fe2/Eclipse-Setup.exe
ftp://ftp.4players.de/pub/pc/halflife2/mods/Eclip
http://download2.gamespot.com/d3/gsc/action/halfl
[sig]www.masterslate.org[/sig]
You know, pure capitalism sucks too. Slave traders were perfectly comfortable under capitalism. Drug dealers too.
The 'best' system for humanity is a melding - 80% capitalism and 20% communism. Why the capitalism? Because you need a way to pay for everything. Why communism? Because if you keep screwing over the poor people (why do the poor get screwed over? simple - they have nothing to lubricate the process).
With such a combination, people (usually poor people) don't get screwed over, and there are incentives to make their life better.
Too much communism, like modern France, and you don't quite have enough to pay for everything necessary.
Too much capitalism, and you get things like the Great Depression.
I would say that Canada probably has the closest to ideal balance.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
It might very well suck, but at least I plan on giving it a chance to prove itself rather than pass judgements based only on its web site. That's like critiquing an entire book because you read the back cover.
And I only said that they should be thanked if it's good. So, tell me, genius, if it sucks and you don't tell them, how the hell are they supposed to know WHY you didn't like it and therefore correct what you don't like? Do you think the fact that you think it suck will somehow reverberate through the air thereby subconsciously communicating with them why you didn't like it? Duh! They need feedback either way! Ignoring them because you don't like their mod isn't going to do anyone any good!
Then again, I should know better than to expect logic from someone who has to post as AC.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
The installer chokes under cedega, but the Eclipse.zip would probably work. Anyone have a link?
Just once I'd like to play a game with female lead character that doesn't make my neighbors think I'm watching porn when I press the jump key.
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
Only on Slashdot, year after year, we get these asshats saying "but real communism hasn't been tried yet."
Communists are like cockroaches, you gotta keep on exterminating them or they just come back.
As I recall, it also turned Quake 1 into a huge cheatfest? That'll put the smackdown on your gaming community. =(
If my memory serves me properly, there was once a game called "Cliver Barker's Undying". In that game there were many journals which reviled secrets and the plot also involved the standing stones. Perhaps the makers have played this game of old.
Its a bit foggy, but reminds me of the character in "Diamond age"'s sub-book - the Primer. Don't flame me, Stevenson fans, it's been 10 years since I read it.
$yourpost =~ s/communism/socialism/gi;
HTH.
So, after Australia began to put would-be asylum-sekers
into detention centers - WAAAaaayyyy out in the desert...
A group of [presumably politically active] game-makers
created a game based on one such prison (Woomera,
in South Australia).
Now, it was never clear how to get this free game working
Somehoe Half-Life was to be installed first...?
But which of several Half-Life modules or system(s), I don't know...?
Has anybody got Escape From Woomera to work...?
If so, How (which specific Half Life engine is needed)?
TIA
Game details at: http://escapefromwoomera.org/
what kind of OLD TYME conversion won't let you eat the MUSHROOMS?
I need them to deal with the ugly text in the Journal...
http://img61.echo.cx/img61/5208/eclipse5ra.jpg
At first I thought 1 FPS was a rounded-up value, as it was more like 0.2 FPS... but I was proved wrong. I figured I could just wait it out, but then I realized it isn't really worth it. I understand it's promotional, but if they'd spent even 15 more minutes developing a storyline (in addition to the 5 they did spend) then I might've actually played it through. Instead I spent 20 minutes in total ignorance of who I was, where I was going, and why I could make objects float in mid air... that is, if I wasn't spending my time waiting.
Compromising game quality for graphic quality is one thing, but if you're going to go the eye-candy route then do it right and use at least a little discretion, ensuring that the game will actually play on anything other than a particle accellerator. The glow-effect annoyed the hell out of me. I found myself rubbing my eyes and putting my face right against the screen because I thought I was going blind.
I dunno. I didn't find it very entertaining or challenging, unless you consider suffering through long choppy intro sequences full of faeries and flowers a challenge.
Good point.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
Ghost Recon is much better than Counterstrike.... and it is available on OSX.
I was at the presentation the team that made this gave at The Guildhall @ SMU on Friday. They had a nice 10 minute or so video about the making that went with it, a contest every 30 minutes to give the person who could last longest in survival mode a t-shirt, and a real life model dressed up as Violet, the main character (complete with costume & tattoos) . Given the limited development time, and small programming staff they had, I think they did a great job.
1st, this thing killed my 6600GT (yea, it's not the best, but c'mon... Doom3 runs better).
2nd, I didn't like the design because I had no idea where my bounds were. I'd be walking normally then just get stopped by an invisible barrier.
3rd... I can make a bagillion things float 6 feet above the ground but I can't reposition them / have them follow me around?
It's a nice idea and all, but the design just got in the way of the fun factor.
I've noticed that all the mods out their are for FPS games, and engines. Now when will we see a mod for the RIVEN, or MYST engine?
Here's the real question: open-source game engines already exist (Quake2, Cube, etc.). Why don't these mod makers just use them? If I were making a mod I'd rather not tie it to some game people have to buy, if I don't have to...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
so will this work with the original EMPORiO release?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Is this the best total conversion there is? After all this time? This does not bode well.
This mod is a good example of how small games that aren't too ambitious are a good starting point for developers without much experience. There was a slashdot article some time ago about short games (linking to an article of the same topic on Gamasutra). However, I feel obliged to mention that the gameplay is, though cool for a time, overly simplistic and would not hold up very well in a longer game. Can this be adjusted? I don't know. I personally believe that Eclipse's gameplay is something of a gimmick, using the physics, that works very well in its frame, but would not scale. (Any SAMU devs reading this: please don't take it to mean your game sucks; I was awed that mere students could pull this off. I mean all of the criticism as constructively as it can be meant.)
or to ask a more direct question - so what whould your self-worth based on?
Ok...irrelevant troll, but I will bite, because it is an interesting discussion.
Communism's fatal flaw is the "free rider" syndrome. Simply put, if people see no potential greater reward for more/harder work, they will tend to coast, and let others do the work. Why work harder if you get nothing out of it? It is not laziness; it is rational behavior. As more and more people pick up on this, the system becomes more and more inefficient, until it collapses under its own weight. How to counter this, and encourage people to work? Capitalism (ideally) rewards work with more pay. Communism (ideally) rewards work with a sense of improving the community, of belonging, of ownership of the whole -- even with good old social peer (not governmental) pressure.
This appear to humanity's better nature works brilliantly in small groups, where most people know each other, and each person's contribution (or lack thereof) is noticeable, and Communism works well on that scale -- think of a monastery, or even the various "communes" that dot the U.S. Even if the person gets no monetary bonus for hard work, the sense of making a difference is itself a wonderful motivating factor, and can keep the entire system going. However, once the social structure becomes large enough, two things occur:
At this point, the individual gains nothing -- no extra money, no extra sense of helping -- from extra work. It is a *very* short step then to becoming a free rider, and the downfall of the system. It is not historical happenstance that Communisim collapsed in the USSR (or Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, and so on); it is inevitable in any sufficiently large social unit.
Does that mean Communism itself is a bad idea? No -- just that, in geek terms, it doesn't scale.
As an aside to your aside, Captialism is not immune. Capitalism (again, ideally) rewards extra work with extra pay. It is less vulnerable to free riders, because a person receives an immediate, tangible benefit from hard work. When, as happens often in Capitalist countries, an individual worker loses that connection -- he/she no longer feels that work helps him/her get ahead -- there are enough others willing to step in and fill the gap for the often marginal extra pay. It sounds brutal, and it is, but it makes Capitalism less vulnerable to the "free rider" syndrome collapsing the entire system. However, once enough workers feel that hard work does not help their situation -- a state of affairs, one could argue, the United States is fast approaching this century -- that system is as surely doomed as were the Communist Bloc countries at the end of the last century.
When is the nude patch coming out for this?
The page itself is a case of bad design: Thumbnails should be direct links, so people can quickly quick them open in tabs - as opposed to this where there is a javascript on each link which only allows you to open one - and totally leave out browsers who do not have (or have enabled) javascript.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
If you don't want to be a victim of their html: http://students.guildhall.smu.edu/eclipse/screensh ots/
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
As an aside to your aside, before I go on, Soviet Russia wasn't a communist economy, it was a centrally planned socialist economy. Communism itself scales so badly that it's never existed outside relatively small worker-owned cooperatives: it requires a market system to actually come into existence. Marx actually seems to have known that, though he saw it as being a successor to a doomed capitalist society rather than something that could grow as an enclave inside one.
As an aside to your aside, Captialism is not immune. Capitalism (again, ideally) rewards extra work with extra pay. It is less vulnerable to free riders, because a person receives an immediate, tangible benefit from hard work. When, as happens often in Capitalist countries, an individual worker loses that connection -- he/she no longer feels that work helps him/her get ahead -- there are enough others willing to step in and fill the gap for the often marginal extra pay. It sounds brutal, and it is, but it makes Capitalism less vulnerable to the "free rider" syndrome collapsing the entire system. However, once enough workers feel that hard work does not help their situation -- a state of affairs, one could argue, the United States is fast approaching this century -- that system is as surely doomed as were the Communist Bloc countries at the end of the last century.
One reason this happens is that the large companies that so many people are working for, the ones that are supposed to act as the agents of the market and provide people with the feedback that their hard work is essential to their well-being, have more and more come to resemble centrally planned socialist economies. Workers see so many people acting as free riders in the system and getting away with it because there's no accountability. They see the board of directors and executive officers as so far away and apparently completely unaware of what's actually happening in the company, they keep making the same kinds of decisions they keep hearing about as causing the downfall of Soviet Russia. Which is why they simply feel equally doomed no matter what they do.
Boooooooring
Come on, the lead heroine doesn't even wear sexy clothing. Why even bother unless the loins are stirred.
A lot of the comments here are pretty brutal. I can't test the game myself, but from the screenshots it looks darn nice. As a short, concept-driven game I'm not surprised to hear that it's not as great as many commercially produced games. But I hardly think that's a good reason to slam this work.
The one thing I wonder is how much skill it takes, beyond understanding the engine you're using, to generate effects like glow and shafts of light and such when working with the Source engine. Did these students need to do anything programming-oriented or did they just use a level editor?
Thanks for that reference, I just checked my MythTV box and Enemy At The Gates is on later. I'll finally get to see it again :)
It's a very good movie. Some people complained that it wasn't graphic enough (due to the fact it was about the Siege of Stalingrad), but it is still a very, very good movie.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"